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Let the mind-reading begin

JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY famously wrote his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with painstaking blinks of his left eye – the only part of his body over which he had any control. We report on a technique that could allow other locked-in people to communicate more naturally, by directly translating their thoughts into words (see “Mind readers&colon; Eavesdropping on your inner voice“).

This stunning research is mainly aimed at liberating minds trapped in broken bodies, but it could also blow the lid off one of the oldest questions in linguistics and philosophy&colon; what is the relationship between language and thought? …